Archives for July, 2006

Hard as it is to believe, the time is fast approaching for yet another edition of the Skeptics’ Circle. Even though it’s set to appear this Thursday, August 3, fortunately there’s still time for skeptical bloggers to get their entries in to Daylight Atheism, in order to “lay waste to superstition and credulity with the…

In the quiet and still of the crypt, something stirred. It was barely perceptible at first, but became more definite. It lived again. In the depths of what remained of its mind, only sheer instinct prevailed. It had fed long and well recently, and had returned to its crypt to digest its unholy meal. Some…

I’ve written before about Hutton Gibson (Mel Gibson’s father) and serious crank, conspiracy theorist and proud Holocaust denier. I even speculated, based on Mel’s cagey answers to direct questions about the Holocaust, speculating about whether he shares some of Hutton’s beliefs. I ended up guessing that Mel just didn’t want to criticize his father, no…

Via Dr. Flea, I find this rather amusing cartoon: Dr. Id, written by Michelle, who, it turns out, was also responsible for the 12 Types of Med Students and a fairly spot-on portrayal of a medical student’s surgery rotation. Dr. Id says what other doctors only wish that they could say and does what other…

You know, although I’m not exactly a huge fan of it, I have sometimes in the past liked to listen to a little dose (but just a little) dose of death metal. Sometimes I’m just in the mood for some over-the-top growled lyrics of death, doom, violence, and destruction shrieked over a churning demonic-sounding metal…

I have to apologize for last week’s Dose of Woo. No, I’m not apologizing for the subject matter (the obsession that reigns supreme among some alties with “cleansing” one’s colon to “purge toxins” and achieve the super-regularity of several bowel movements a day). Rather, I’m sorry I didn’t point out just how disgusting one of…

It’s not your Friday Dose of Woo yet, but fear not. You’ll get your weekly dose of woo in due course. Kevin Trudeau is arguably the most prominent snakeoil salesmen of our time. I’ve leafed through his first book, Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About at the bookstore and recoiled at the…

I hadn’t intended to mention this case again for a while, but an article in Stats.org brought up a point that, although I had somewhat alluded to it, I hadn’t really explicitly addressed. It has nothing to do with the judicial decision, the Cherrixes’ successful appeal for a new trial and the stay ordered by…

Enjoy, as blog comrade and fellow traveler in the fight against Holocaust denial Andrew Mathis shows us how it’s done when Holocaust denier Michael Collins Piper writes to threaten to sue him for libel. Andrew asks: Michael Collins Piper: Filthy Jew-hater or twisted anti-Semite? You be the judge! Can I pick “both of the above”?

When you don’t have time to write something substantive, what do you do? Post YouTubes videos, of course! Sadly, I can almost relate to this one (after all, thanks to BitTorrent, I have now seen all of the episodes from season two of the resurrected series, with David Tennant playing The Doctor): (Hat tip: Stupid…

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to write much for today. Fortunately, this gives me the perfect opportunity to remedy a situation in which I’ve been remiss. As you know, Kathleen Seidel has been tirelessly exposing the dubious science promoted by Mark and David Geier, who advocate using Lupron to shut of sex hormone synthesis as…

Alright, now they’ve gone too far. I thought I’d seen every specious and fallacious argument and example that creationists could throw out there to annoy scientists and be gobbled up by the credulous, but I was wrong. They’re muscling in on my turf now! No, they’re not making fallacious arguments about how chemotherapy resistance says…

From the AP: NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — A 16-year-old cancer patient was headed to court Tuesday with his lawyers to try to block a judge’s order requiring him to report to a hospital the same day for treatment as doctors deem necessary. A juvenile court judge on Monday denied a request by lawyers for Starchild…

Not surprisingly, since the court decided that Abraham Cherrix, a Virginia teen who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease at age 15, underwent chemotherapy, relapsed, and then refused to undergo any further chemotherapy, opting instead for an “alternative medicine” treatment known as the Hoxsey treatment, to be administered at the Biomedical Center in Tijuana, the blogosphere…

Eh Nonymous has posted a first hand account of a speech by Judge John E. Jones III, who decided the Kitzmiller v. Dover case on “intelligent design” creationism in Dover. We need more judges like him. My only thought is: How on earth did this guy get appointed to the federal bench by the Bush…

It looks as though it’s time to ‘fess up. It’s us surgeons who are the source of all that CO2. Sid Schwab tells us why. (And, no, it’s not because of all the hot air we surgeons are capable of producing; we’re nothing compared to politicians in that respect.)

I tell you, I take a night off from blogging, not even glancing at the blog or my e-mail, instead falling into a deep slumber at 10 PM after The Dog Whisperer on TV, thanks to a somewhat stressful week and a large meal plus a beer, and what happens? Abraham’ Cherrix’s uncle comments on…

The latest Carnival of Bad History has been posted over at Hiram Hover‘s. If you think the Bush Administration can abuse science, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet when it comes to how history is abused by various people and groups for ideological purposes!

A little blog housekeeping is in order here. Several days ago, the overlords at SEED Magazine installed a new spam filter, which, despite some fine-tuning over the last several days, unfortunately still seems a bit more indiscriminate than we’d like, sometimes gobbling up legitimate comments without our being able to figure out what words are…

Alright, I admit it. I went a little overboard with last week’s edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. This feature was intended to be a light-hearted look at whatever particular woo target that catches my fancy on a given week, as opposed to the more serious discussions of alternative medicine I like to do…

You may have noticed that I opted out of the last two or three weeks worth of Ask a ScienceBlogger questions. The last couple of weeks it was because the questions simply didn’t interest me, and the week before that it was because i just plain forgot. This week, however, our overlords at SEED Magazine…